


The Saints of Sweat and Strappings

by RoryKurago



Series: First Floor People [3]
Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fight Club Fusion, Becket Family Feels, Gen, Polyamory, Saint George and the Dragon mythos, appearances by other pilots
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-12
Updated: 2016-06-12
Packaged: 2018-07-14 13:13:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,297
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7173176
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RoryKurago/pseuds/RoryKurago
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Pentecost calls the next fighter Mako is slated to fight ‘Slattern’. Raleigh doesn’t know him well enough to tell if he’s being facetious.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Saints of Sweat and Strappings

**Author's Note:**

> I'm not at all happy with the way _She Had Fire In Her Soul_ turned out, so I'm breaking it down and re-writing it.

Pentecost calls the next fighter Mako is slated to fight ‘Slattern’. Raleigh doesn’t know him well enough to tell if he’s being facetious. What Raleigh does know is that Lavazzi has bounced through a handful gyms in her career. Her record – forty bouts, forty wins, thirty-two TKOs – is concerning. And that the gym she’s running with at the moment, Anteverse, is the same crew that ran the fighter who killed Luna Pentecost.

Pentecost dismisses the assembly in his office. Singly and in groups, fighters, trainers, and observers leave the gym. The Kaidonovskys snag Yuna and So-Yi by the arms and head out to karaoke night; Herc and Chuck go back to wrangling with faulty lights in the Pit; Tendo’s got to get back to Alison and their kid; Vanessa’s already on the phone. Mako—

Raleigh thought Mako was right behind him leaving Pentecost’s office but when he turns back, she’s still standing by the desk. The set of her shoulders is—

Raleigh goes to retrieve his watch and wallet from his locker. When he returns, Mako is standing by the kitchenette with a six-pack of Corona dangling from one hand. Without a word, she leads the way up to the roof.

They’re halfway through the first bottle apiece when Chuck wanders up and throws himself down beside them. He frowns at the bottle Raleigh holds out to him and mutters something about imported piss, but takes it.

The sun is dipping low in the west by the time Mako pops the lid off her second bottle. She drinks deeply, her back to Raleigh’s chest. She still hasn’t said a word.

It’s the last alcohol she’ll have for three months. It’s also the first day of the new year.

Almost absent-mindedly Chuck picks up the discarded lid, bends it straight, and flips it like a coin. “What are you thinking, Blue?”

Mako studies the neck of her Corona. When she twists it, light splays like neurons across her hand. “Luna used to complain that Corona wasn’t real beer.”

Raleigh had held off asking about Luna Pentecost the same way Mako never asked about the ring on a Raleigh’s necklace, or the letters returned to sender collecting in a pile in his drawer of the dresser; the same way Raleigh never asked how an Australian airman and his son ended up in a US gym run by a Brit with a Japanese daughter.

But he knows the bones of it; Tendo, as it happens, is not only a bomb MC but could basically run a Cold War spy network. (Moreso because that fucker is polyglottal in a way even Raleigh – brought up bilingual and now learning Japanese – can only wonder at.)

By Tendo’s count, the Shatterdome has three patron saints: Stacker Pentecost, Tamsin Sevier, and Luna.

The set of Mako’s shoulders as she stood talking to her father was too taut, rigidly straight, and her chin trembled as she held it up. Was it was fear?

Fear in Mako normally looked like jabs too hard, knees to the sternum, bruised lips, and her breath against the pillow counting back from twenty. He’d never seen Mako afraid of a fighter. As far as Raleigh knows, Mako's had fifty-one fights to date. Fifty-one wins. She's been practicing since she was thirteen, She spars with the Weis, the Koreans, the Kaidonovskys, with Chuck. But she's afraid of Lavazzi.

Raleigh hadn’t been surprised to learn from Tendo that Herc was originally a fighter, or that Herc and Pentecost started up the Shatterdome in partnership twelve years back alongside another fighter, Tamsin Sevier. He _had_ been surprised to learn that the reason a Brit and an Australian were running an underground fight club in Chicago was that the Brit’s sister had died in one.

San Francisco, 2013.

Mako, Tendo says, was watching ringside. There is no way she didn't get to see the spark leave Luna's eyes the same way Raleigh watched it leave Yancy's. In his mind's eye, Raleigh can see her standing there, small in orange Team Jaeger jacket with her hands balled into fists already growing callus across the knuckles. He can hear the blare of the horn sounding the end of the round, then the roar of the crowd when Luna's opponent kept coming.

He can see the dust rise from the mat as Luna goes down and smell the blood that hits Mako's face.

He doesn't know if that's how it really went down. There's no footage from that night.

What he does know is that the line of hiragana along the edge of Mako’s chainsword tattoo reads ' _I am coming for the ones who hurt me'_ , and that although Mako is not religious - doesn't pray, doesn't believe in anything but the church of sweat and strappings - she still burns four sticks of incense at a time; and in the Ready Room before every fight, she touches a photo on the wall like a talismen: Herc, Stacker, Tamsin, and Luna all in shinpads and shorts in the ring. Then, bowing her head to it, she slaps her tattoo with a strapped hand and goes out to dismantle whatever is in the ring.

"You don't have to do this," Raleigh says softly.

"The fuck are you talkin' about," Chuck sputters. Part of a mouthful of Corona mists the air. " 'course she does! We won't be intimidated by some jumped-up West Coast shits."

Mako is silent. Still, her lips twitch as she contemplates the light playing over her hand. The red sunset twists it into veins, or the still-soft fold lines of Damascus steel. Raleigh can see Mako thinking. Contemplating her own impermanence, maybe. This morning she woke up before them both. Wouldn't comment on the bruise-like shadows beneath her eyes, or the actual bruises on her thighs. Wouldn't let either of them accompany her on her morning run with Pentecost.

Raleigh doesn't _know_ what's in her head but he can guess. Pan Pacific fighters don't quit. They don't back down.

"Chuck is right," she says finally.

Chuck manages to look smug and concerned at once, but before he can crow about it Mako goes on.

"Sensei told me that Lavezzi's trainer is the same one who coached Terèse Parshin. That's the fighter who was in the ring with Luna when--" she pauses: collecting herself. Resettling the straps on her armour. "If I back out, Lavazzi goes to Titles, and Anteverse has free rein to do what they like. I have to do this. For the gym. For Sensei."

Very deliberately, she sets aside her empty bottle and pats Chuck on the knee. “Come on. Let’s celebrate the new year properly.”

Raleigh watches her stretch while Chuck slots the empty bottles back into the carton. She moves too stiffly; jerky, as if glass or grit has gotten into her joints and seized up her mechanics. Mako glances down at him with the sun at her back. The world becomes briefly red and glowing, with Mako at its centre: less a heart than a girl-shaped hollow.

 _Are you all right._ It would be so easy to ask.

But she's Mako. She would lie, just like Raleigh would lie. Just like he and Yancy had lied every time Jaz asked them if their bruises didn’t hurt. Just like Raleigh lied when he laced his fingers through his sister’s in that hospital waiting room and told her Yancy would pull through.

Mako would lie like Stacker when he said his ribs didn’t hurt; and like Tamsin when she said she didn't mind the cancer, she was tired and wanted to go to Luna.

In this underground church of saints and sinners, every devotee wanted to be Saint George. It just scared Raleigh a little to think Mako was next in line to be canonised.


End file.
